Posted
by
kdawsonon Tuesday March 17, 2009 @02:08PM
from the on-average-we-all-have-jobs dept.

netbuzz sends along a piece from Network World reporting that the number of computer science majors enrolled at US universities increased for the first time in six years, according to new survey data out this morning. The Taulbee Study found that the number of undergraduates signed up as computer science majors rose 8% last year. The survey was conducted last fall, just as the economic downturn started to bite. The article notes the daunting competition for positions at top universities: Carnegie Mellon University received 2,600 applications for 130 undergrad spots, and 1,400 for 26 PhD slots. "...the popularity of computer science majors among college freshmen and sophomores is because IT has better job prospects than other specialties, especially in light of the global economic downturn. ... The latest unemployment numbers for 2008 for computer software engineers is 1.6%... That's beyond full employment. ... The demand for tech jobs may rise further thanks to the Obama Administration's stimulus package, which could create nearly 1 million new tech jobs."

the popularity of computer science majors among college freshmen and sophomores is because IT has better job prospects than other specialties

How does that make it cool? It sounds more like desperation.

Exactly.

What's worse, is that computer science is not relevant for most IT positions. Unless you are programming, but those jobs are the smallest slice of the IT pie.Those kids would be better off at a trade school or VoTech learning networking, systems administration, etc.

Next winter you can expect to see an article alerting us to a sudden surge in CS majors who are switching or dropping out & going to IT tech schools.

Man I need to start copying and pasting my response to this question. If the kid wanted to take the easy route, yes, VoTech is the way to go. However, I have made a rather sucessful carreer as a network/system admin with a BS in CS. Sure I dont work on microcontrollers and I cant tell you how to write C++ anymore. But the vision and reasoning skills I received by getting a BSCS gives me a huge advantage. (relevant books in parenthesis) I can relate to any area of IT easily, I can read code smoothly (Essentials of programming languages), I can troubleshoot (File structures,algorithms and analysis), predict future needs (numerical analysis), adapt easily to different OS's (Applied Operating system Concepts), and can relate socially (many late nights at the bar).

Yes CS CAN be IT, is there an easier way to do it? Oh hell ya. But you miss out on so much. Vo-tech is outdated in 5 years...BSCS well that hasnt changed in what...40-50 years?

Do yourself a favor, go find the richest, most Republican suburb you can, and find its mall. Time how long it takes from stepping out of your car to finding Army recruiters. Move towards the urban center and repeat this experiment every five miles.

Feel free to stop when you can't make it to the mall doors anymore. Then look around, and look at the economic conditions people there live in. Ask yourself whether you feel "desperation" or "patriotism".

One of my close friends is a (Republican) trust fund baby who joined the Army to get some self-discipline and find some kind of sense of purpose. It has served him well for all the many years after he left. Just about everyone in the armed services talks like a Republican, and most vote that way.

I think you're confusing "poor" with "desperate". Making a considered choice that joining the Army is the best way to better your life (and not incedentaly serve your country). That choice is more likely if your

A lot of the people who are in the US military - about 40,000 - aren't even US citizens. Clearly, they aren't motivated by patriotism (at least not patriotism of their home nations.) They are serving another country with the hopes of joining it, because they are desperate to become US residents.

The people who are being targeted in inner city recruitment centers consider the Army because they lack a lot of other options.

This is about the enlisted ranks: officer commissions are a different matter entirely, and US military officers are, indeed, usually very accomplished. But for the enlisted ranks, you are in denial if you think that much, even most, recruitment isn't essentially a business proposition, a quid-pro-quo, usually directed to people with few other viable choices.

I have looked at the average person that enlists in the Army. Have you? Sure, there's some amount of falling for a recruiter's sales pitch, but there's a lot of deliberate decisions to make one's life better through self improvement. Self improvement is rarely anyone's first choice, but neither is it a sign of desperation! I've also looked at the average person who thinks "work" is some sort of scam invented by "the man", and I far prefer the company of the average person that enlists in the Army!

Studying art (and literature and film etc.) may actually help make you interesting to people who are outside your field of specialization. Heck, I even find people in my field of specialization boring if that's all they know.

These ain't programmers, nor are they REAL "Software Engineers", the article writers are throwing Project Managers and Software Architects into the mix to get their numbers:

"The latest unemployment numbers for 2008 for computer software engineers is 1.6%...That's beyond full employment," says Josh James, Director of Research and Industry Analysis with TechAmerica. "Computer programmers' unemployment rate has gone up from 2.5% in 2007 to 3.7% in 2008. That's a sign that programming skills are easier to do from anywhere in the world. But the high-growth jobs include skills that are hard to send abroad such as systems integration and IT managers."

In other words, for the type of *real programmer* who isn't on a team and does everything from Requirements Gathering to QA (and everything in between) your job is STILL threatened by outsourcing. But the schools have finally figured that out, so instead of teaching basic concepts like data mining and programming, they're teaching people to be managers right out of the box. Dilbert Principle, here we come.

Data mining and databases aren't really the same thing (although mining is often performed on databases). Data mining is actually pretty similar to AI: it involves tasks such as classification, clustering, and feature extraction that require constructing statistical models and learning about the dataset in question. The techniques involve more linear algebra and statistics than many CS undergrads will take. Moreover, mining isn't explicitly demanded in industry (certainly not at the level that programming is, at least). I suspect most people are unaware of it.

And 99.99% of the applications anybody will PAY you to write, will be data mining applications at this point

I think data mining will increase in the future, and I definitely agree that database design needs to be taught to new developers. But data mining is still FAR from 99% of new development.

Traditional reporting and traditional OLTP apps are still going to be the majority of development. If you disagree on my OLTP statement, who do you think is going to be GENERATING all of the data that 99.99% of these new grads are going to be mining? It takes multiple OLTP apps to generate one data warehouse worth m

Traditional reporting and traditional OLTP apps are still going to be the majority of development. If you disagree on my OLTP statement, who do you think is going to be GENERATING all of the data that 99.99% of these new grads are going to be mining? It takes multiple OLTP apps to generate one data warehouse worth mining, after all.

I don't necessarily disagree that reporting and OLTP are big. I do disagree that these require *development*. Instead, to a large extent, OLTP and traditional reportin

OLTP and traditional reporting are just reinventing the wheel- one can just slightly modify an open source program, change the UI and port to a new platform, and whammo, you've got your OLTP and traditional reporting.

Anybody working as the only developer in a company of less than 40 people.

That's getting a bit rare, since contract programming is getting so cheap, but it's the situation I'm best in. Luckily, it's what I landed in this last round- after my contract with Intel went tits up in the last round of 90% decrease in net profit, my contracting company, which usually does only internationalization jobs, suddenly realized that they had a bunch of back-office proprietary software that needed updating, and nobody to

You're essentially telling us you have a negative opinion of team-based projects. It behooves you to at least have a neutral opinion. Being able to work as effectively on a team as you do independently is an asset that would make you less likely to be replaced by outsourcing. The reality is, depending on the size and scope of the individual project, many projects do require contribution from an entire team in order to be successful.

Reminds me of a comment by the CEO of one of the Indian outsourcing companies (Tata Consultancy?), "If India is going to continue to be successful in attracting outsourced work from the USA, the US must put more effort in attracting graduates into management roles".

Now that the financial industry is in shambles (what do they produce, again?) the only way to make bank without sacrificing the 8 to 12 years of your youth to med school or law school is engineering. And since most people are now familiar with computers, software engineering seems more accessible.

This makes perfect sense. Engineers make more money than any other Bachelors degrees can get you. Many students don't realize that it is damn hard to get an engineering degree compared to other degrees, though. At least, that's true of good colleges.

All of the "Software Engineering" coursework around here is training in more of the abstract and organizational aspects of programming such as development methodologies and teamwork, buzzwords, fancy colored charts, and consulting.

All of the classes I know of which use programming to solve math problems are under the umbrella of the math departments. YMMV.

Who said anything about math? Scientific computing, including math-related stuff, is not what's driving software engineering employment. It's the ability to produce software which helps business that's driving the hiring. This means "pure" programming, yes, but also HCI, communication, design, testing methodology... there's a lot more to producing software than just programming.

I may have misunderstood your juxtaposition of engineering and software engineering. Engineering is applied math, Software Engineering is the business aspects of software development.

That juxtaposition frequently causes misunderstandings about what comprises software engineering. Every angry nitpicker on Slashdot who bitches and moans about "software engineer" being a misleading(at best, bullshit at worst) title if the engineer isn't a P.E. [wikipedia.org] makes my point.

Software Engineering is actually more of a Business Study then a Technical Study. That said it is pritty darn useful. While a lot of people know how to program very few are able to make an application.

That's because economist-bureaucrats have defined a certain level of unemployment as "full employment". They figure you're always going to have some people who are out of work... so they don't count that many of them.

Full employment is defined as around 5% unemployment. This is made up of frictional unemployment, people between jobs or looking for their first one, structural unemployment, people whose skills are obsolete, and cyclical unemployment, unemployment due to the ebb and flow of the business cycle.

The reason I went back to school in 2002 to study IT (when everyone told me I was crazy) was for three future trends: baby boomers will be retiring, India and China will eventually keep their IT workers at home for their own economies, and the U.S. won't have enough college graduates to meet the demand. In short, there will be crunch for skilled IT workers (i.e., "beyond full employment").

The idea here is that "full employment" is the condition where there's a job available for everyone who wants to work at the prevailing wage. There's still unemployment in that situation, because it takes time to fill positions. If you're given 2 week's notice that your position is being eliminated, and you get multiple leads and go on several interviews in that time (as happened in my last gig), and you know what your new job is by you la

Harsha says computer science majors are critical for the U.S. economy because their training provides them with computational thinking and problem solving skills that they can deploy in any industry.

So does: physics, chemistry, engineering, math, accounting....

"The primary reason for the downturn in computer science majors was the erroneous fear that everything was being outsourced to India, which we know is not true," says Prof. Jerry Luftman, executive director of the School of Technology Management at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J.

The lobbying group TechAmerica says computer software engineering and computer systems design are the fastest-growing high tech jobs, even in the fourth quarter of 2008.

Who is this "TechAmerica"? The lobbying group TechAmerica says computer software engineering and computer systems design are the fastest-growing high tech jobs, even in the fourth quarter of 2008. Oh, I see. So, corps want more H1-Bs, I take it and they're setting up the public opinion to be more open to it in these troubling times.

The whole article keeps mentioning "IT","IT","IT" and only once did they say something mobile devices. I wish they would say exactly what area of IT is booming.

"The primary reason for the downturn in computer science majors was the erroneous fear that everything was being outsourced to India, which we know is not true," says Prof. Jerry Luftman, executive director of the School of Technology Management at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J.

Really? Tell that to IBM.

How does the fact that IBM is telling some of their workers to move to India to keep their jobs means everything is being outsourced to India?

I only skimmed the article, but I never saw any mention what's happening to CS enrollment relative to *other* departments. It was my understanding that there is a general increase in college/grad enrollment in most departments when the economy dips.

You can't get through a single news item or political speech on the subject of the current job market without the reporter/politician saying something about how people need to be retrained for jobs in "health care" or "high tech", because that's where the jobs will be. Of course this doesn't mean that we'll have a surplus of job openings in IT... only that most other fields (especially manufacturing and farming) are contracting like an old red supergiant.

(The only field that really looks good for the foreseeable future is nursing. With the Boomers already starting into their 60s and lifespans reaching into the medically-dependent 90s, there is going to be a persistent need for lots of nurses in the decades to come, and that's something that simply cannot be "off-shored". How we'll pay them all a living wage is a good question, but at least they'll have jobs.)

I don't understand why a kid WOULDN'T want to be a CS major--at least here in Austin, TX. When I was 22, fresh with my useless Liberal Arts degree, the best job (in today's dollars) I could have hoped for would have been around $30k a year. We hire kids that are near graduation from the University of Texas and Texas State University to do monkey-code, starting at around $60k with full benefits (and they still have a hard time making it to work on time or taking direction...get off my lawn!)

Most companies really don't care about college rankings, but I'll take your word for it. Unfortunately, I'd rather retain my modicum of anonymity than tell you where I work. But if you are willing to relocate for a tech-savvy area, give Austin a look (just watchout for layoffs at Dell, AMD and Freescale Semiconductor). Great quality of life, low cost of living, no income tax, nice weather, college town...

Most companies really don't care about college rankings, but I'll take your word for it. Unfortunately, I'd rather retain my modicum of anonymity than tell you where I work. But if you are willing to relocate for a tech-savvy area, give Austin a look (just watchout for layoffs at Dell, AMD and Freescale Semiconductor). Great quality of life, low cost of living, no income tax, nice weather, college town...

It's unfortunate you're not willing to give me a company name. Remember I risk my anonymity too as a sudden out of state applicant.

I feel for the hotshot larval geek that's been programming since he was in the single digits, knows 3-4 operating systems, and can put together a computer in 15 minutes while getting a blowjob and having a gun pointed at his head, who is going to enroll in a CS program and find out he knows fuckall about "computer science."

Lest I get modded down for being an elitist prick, I'm not bashing those kids. I *am* one (although too old to be a kid). It's all downhill from Discrete Math...

Those kids can go to a tech school and become electrical technicians. Plugging a damn PCI card in has nothing to do with computer science. Knowing your way around the start menu has nothing to do with computer science.

Computer science is a mathematical discipline that has little to do with computers at all. If only more high school kids knew that, the drop-rate of Computer Science/Engineering degrees wouldn't be so high.

Hell, coupled with the fact that I waited until I already had a job as a programmer to finish school (because now I can afford it), the workload is insaaaane. Theory of Computation is a bitch.

I've been tempted to drop a few times. Fortunately, I'm too stubborn and manage to sacrifice a few months of sleep/life at a time to pull out a B. Glad too, because the stuff is damn interesting. Complicated as all getout, but interesting.

I feel for the hotshot larval geek that's been programming since he was in the single digits, knows 3-4 operating systems, and can put together a computer in 15 minutes while getting a blowjob and having a gun pointed at his head...

Although I am grateful to be gainfully employed, could you please tell me where you interviewed?

Okay, you got me. I'm married. But you're not reading this, are you honey?

One area that didn't show improvement in the latest Taulbee Survey is the number of women pursuing computer science degrees, which held steady at 11.8%

Times are rough perhaps, but they aren't rough enough yet that women are eager to sign up for the disrespect we have to put up with. Perhaps being a Lawyer or a Doctor isn't as sure a thing anymore, but at least they still make more money and get more respect, for roughly the same mental outlay.

I love learning but am sick of institutionalized education. The problem is the right way to do education is incredibly expensive, incredibly time-consuming, but if we had proper priorities as a society, would be seen as completely worth it. At this point, only idiots or saints would go into a career in education. There's no money in it, and I'm not talking about enough money to become a rich bastard, I'm talking about enough money to avoid poverty.

I'm not quite sure what the right solution is yet but I'm wondering if it might not be a good idea to start on the Young Lady's Primer. We've certainly made some advancements on the sort of technology that would be required.

While interest in the field is good, there are still some major barriers to entry that need to be considered.

1. Unlike previous downturns, we currently have tons of IT/CS people out of work. I'm very lucky to have work; according to all my colleagues, hiring is extremely limited, especially in large public companies. In addition, competition for these jobs is incredibly tough.

2. Outsourcing has not gone away. IBM's a perfect example, as are many of the other professional services firms. India is rapidly moving up the food chain, and even advanced dev jobs are moving elsewhere very quickly. The best strategy is to get involved with a small company who doesn't have the resources to manage an outsourcing engagement.

3. A corollary to #2 - Lots of companies are "discovering" they don't need an IT department anymore. Most of the programming jobs will be for vendors, if the whole "cloud computing" fad turns out to be more than a fad.

4. Don't assume you can choose where you work, if that's important to you. Companies are shifting their support functions to cheaper locations within the US, so keep that in mind unless you don't care about living in Boston vs. Omaha.

So, as always IT and programming are fun fields to be in, but just keep in mind that the employment prospects are still unstable. If you're the kind who doesn't mind bouncing from one 6-month contract to another, you'll do fine. Full time work might be harder to come by.

Here's a story about two friends with a passing interest in computer work: one is a highly-skilled (former) US Army linguist, the other is a recently laid-off pastor. At times within the last year both have asked me (the geekiest of our clan of friends) about "getting into computers" and "making websites" (*cringe*).

It's hard to offer advice to people who've suddenly decided this is what they want to do... and there's absolutely no comparison to my history of interest, hobbyist pursuits, self-teaching and

These are kids that have learned that MBAs aren't in demand any more since the financial collapse and are going into computers because it is the only decent paying job left that doesn't require an advanced degree.

I'm thinking that a great number of these may well be current IT people who never had a degree who, seeing the ax starting to fall, are trying to finally hustle to get some validation for their position or at least secure more power in their search for a new position. I would think that when people start to worry about their job they look for a way to make themselves more marketable. I wonder if there is a way to see if the numbers of 'students' trying to pass entry and mid level certs is

Interesting statistic in that I am about to get laid off (BSCS with 15+ years of experience), along with four other programmers (two already gone), two software QA, a manager, and two tech support people.
I've already interviewed with one company over a week and a half ago and haven't heard back yet. I heard through an acquaintance that the company's HR was overwhelmed with the number of applicants.
It feels kind of like the government's inflation rate statistic; the annual retported number has been real

I have been programming since I was 8 years old (made a kick ass dog racing game in 2nd grade), but decided to be a philosophy major at UCLA instead of a CS major. The best decision I ever made. My philosophy training (I specialized in formal logic theory) has helped my programming more than any CS class would have. A good programmer needs to be able to teach themselves, or they will be obsolete almost immediately. Learning how to use logic and transform abstract human concepts into a formal logic representation is the true base skill for programmers.

It worked out for me.... 4 years removed from graduation, I have a great programming job that I love, making excellent money, and happy as can be.

"Learning how to use logic and transform abstract human concepts into a formal logic representation is the true base skill for programmers."

Which is why we teach it to freshmen. Sadly, most of them find the subject so difficult they sell their book and try their hardest to forget they ever knew it. I've literally had Computer Engineering friends tell me that logic started at 0 and ended at 1. Nothing more complicated than that should exist, he asserted.

A BSCS is almost as difficult as a degree in engineering, but it's as worthless as a degree in Liberal Arts.

Look at the job ads, employers don't give a damn about your silly BSCS, they want experience - many years of professional, verifiable, recent experience, and in many different technologies, and no jobs have the same requirements.

Maybe there are few slashdot readers, who don't live in caves, who may have noticed that practically ever major tech employer has been laying workers by the thousands - especially US IT workers. And yet you are going to believe this corporate sponsored bullshit? You have my pity.

man, where is my +1 awesome....;) Need we remind people of how many movies are made about our jobs...hackers, sneakers, swordfish, several TV channels, Entire clothing lines, not to mention the gadgets we were ridiculed for carrying around 10-20 years ago are the fashion accessories of today. Ya, we are not cool...

I remember back at the end of college (I believe the yankees call it 'high school'), I was discussing with people they were going to do at university (which I believe the yankees call college, confusingly enough).

One bright young spark was emphatic that he was going to do IT and become rich - IT, he said, was only going to continue growing. Fair enough. But this was 1998, and by the time he graduated in 2002, the dot-com bubble was over and suddenly employment opportunities for CSIT people were much mor

McDonalds. To save money, they are no longer purchasing specialized cash registers with individual buttons per item. Going forward, a new generation of tech-savvy employees will have to "program" the register to display the order price.

Obama had better cut all those programs. Carriers are archaic, we can reach around the globe w/ an R/C plane powered by the electricity generated by mom's farts. Submarines, well, I'm w/ you on that one. The f-22 is outdated now.

Just cause we are going to cut some millitary programs doesn't mean we won't invest in others. Sharks w/ Lazors coming soon!

You forgot Future Combat Systems (FCS). There's something like 200,000 of us on that program (I'm not an engineer, but I work for a bunch of them) and when they cut FCS, that's a whole lot of engineers looking for work.

The problem with new CS/IT grads is that they mostly do not know how to design software or even how a computer works at a basic level. In the last ten or more years most of these computer science majors are familiar with Java but know no assembly and very little C and have more training in Web design than in systems analysis.

We have a winner!

I'm currently in my second year of CS undergrad, and the sheer number of people who bitch constantly about having to use pointers, manual memory allocation, C, and assembly in our school's "Architecture and Assembly" class absolutely astounds me. People seem to figure that if they know Java they're a programmer and that if they know discrete mathematics on top of Java it makes them a computer scientist. For someone who spent his early years messing about with pointers and in-line assembly

You want to create tech jobs, Mr. Government? Send back the H1B Visas to their home countries, and stop letting more in here for big corporations to hire cheaper than Americans.

The United States was built and paid for with the blood, sweat, tears, and even the lives of immigrants. Ninety-nine percent of every citizen's great grandparents, great-great grandparents etc. came to the U.S. from another country. Personally, I think we should welcome talented and hard working people in to the U.S., naturalize th